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Whenever he stopped for breath, a shout would go up, beginning with the blocks of uniformed men: "Makann! Makann! Makann the Leader! Makann to Power!" "You even let him have a private army?" he asked the Crown Prince. "Oh, those silly buffoons and their musical-comedy uniforms," the Crown Prince shrugged. "They aren't armed." "Not visibly," he granted. "Not yet."
He was a little surprised to find that, after almost eight years of bearing the name himself, he was using it as an other-people label. Well, why not? He was the ruler of the civilized planet of Tanith, wasn't he? "But let's not start fighting them till the main war's over. Those three shiploads are no worse than a bad cold; Makann and Dunnan are the plague."
They merely told him that Makann was a crackpot with a contemptible following of half-wits, and just wait till the election and see what happened. "I'm inclined to agree with Prince Trask," Bentrik said soberly. "And I'm afraid the election results will be a shock to us, not to Makann." He hadn't talked that way on the ship.
With a shock, Trask recalled that he was a professor of economics. Alvyn Karffard wouldn't need any twenty ships to loot Marduk. Just infiltrate it with about a hundred smart confidence men and inside a year they'd own everything on it. That started them all off on Zaspar Makann, though. Some of them thought he had a few good ideas, but was damaging his own case by extremism.
Paytrik Morland, who had known Dunnan and had seen Makann on screen, ought to have known that too, but he either didn't think of it or didn't want to weaken a case he had completely accepted. "As far as I can find out, nobody even heard of Makann till about five years ago. That would be about the time Dunnan would have arrived on Marduk," he said.
It hasn't quite gotten that far on the Sword-Worlds yet." "It hasn't here, either. Yet." Goodman Mikhyl slipped away; King Mikhyl VIII looked across the low table at his guest. "Prince Trask, have you heard of a man named Zaspar Makann?" "Occasionally. Nothing good about him." "He is the most dangerous man on this planet," the King said. "And I can make nobody believe it. Not even my son."
The trouble was, they couldn't. They could turn off the screen, but Zaspar Makann would go on screaming, and millions all over the planet would still hear him. Bentrik twiddled the selector. The voice stuttered briefly, and then came echoing out of the speaker, but this time the pickup was somewhere several hundred feet above a great open park.
Drawn a deadline, and opened machine-gun fire as soon as the mob crossed it, and kept on firing till the survivors turned tail and ran. Then sent out more cars, and shot everybody wearing a People's Watchmen uniform, all over town. Inside forty-eight hours, there'd be no People's Welfare party, and no Zaspar Makann either." The Crown Prince's face stiffened.
The assassin, an unknown man believed to be a Gilgamesher, had been shot to death by People's Watchmen guarding Prince Edvard at once. Immediately Makann had seized the Royal Palace to protect the King, and immediately there had been massacres by People's Watchmen everywhere.
Paytrik Morland, who was Gram-born and had been speaking for a return in force to fight against Omfray of Glaspyth and his supporters, defected from them at once. He had been on Marduk and knew who Zaspar Makann was; he had made friends with the Royal Navy officers, and had been shocked to hear that they were now enemies.
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